"Oh, honey, I"m so sorry. And after all you"ve done ... all these years. I wish I knew what to tell you."
"I wish you did, too."
We were silent for a time. "How"s Barbara?"
"At the end of her tether," I admitted, grateful to have my wife, who"d borne all of this so patiently for three long decades, finally acknowledged. "Still here. Though, honestly, I can"t imagine why."
"I feel so bad for her."
Suddenly I was anxious for the conversation to be over. You couldn"t ask for a better confidante than my aunt, but I always felt like our shared understanding of my mother"s condition, "her nerves," amounted to a shabby conspiracy against a sick woman, and I suspected Phyllis felt all too keenly that same sense of betrayal. And perhaps most unforgivable was that telephoning my aunt this evening, to prepare her for the call she"d be getting in the morning, const.i.tuted poisoning the well in advance of my mother"s thirsty arrival.
That must"ve happened near the crack of dawn, because it was still very early when our telephone rang, waking us up. "Well, it"s over," my mother said, not bothering with h.e.l.lo. "I guess I"m not going anywhere."
"I"m sorry, Mom," I told her, but she"d already hung up.
I lay there in bed for a long time, trying to imagine that terrible conversation with my aunt, who would"ve told her, as gently as possible, that what she was proposing simply wouldn"t work, that most likely she wouldn"t be staying in Gloversville that much longer herself, that by the end of the year she"d be putting the house on the market for what little it would bring, that after sorting things out she"d probably move in with one of her daughters. Knowing my aunt, I suspect she put in a good word on my behalf, reminding my mother that I loved her, that I"d always been there when she needed me, that she belonged close by so I could look after her, that she was lucky to have a son willing to do all that.
At some point another possibility occurred to me: that my mother hadn"t called her sister at all, that all this was just between us, as it had always been. Locked in a two-person drama, we had no need for additional players.
BUILDING FLOOR-TO-CEILING SHELVES in the downstairs bedroom, which would double as a library and reading room when we didn"t have guests, was the first order of business in the new Camden house. We"d hired a carpenter to begin work the day after the closing. "This whole wall?" he said dubiously, convinced we were nuts once we explained what we had in mind. After all, the living room already had ceiling-height bookcases, and the wall in question was very long indeed. n.o.body had that many books. When we a.s.sured him we knew what we were doing, he reluctantly agreed, as if it were a bathroom he was remodeling and we"d instructed him to install three toilets, side by side. "As long as you won"t get mad at me."
In a sense the carpenter had been right. We had badly misjudged-by underestimating what we needed. I"d forgotten that in addition to Barbara"s and mine from the Waterville house there were all the books from my office at Colby College. We"d unpacked the books onto the new shelves hurriedly, almost helter-skelter, figuring that later we could rearrange them at our leisure and make sure d.i.c.kens and Trollope and Austen were comfortably rubbing spines and that Hammett and Chandler and James M. Cain and Ross Macdonald were in close enough proximity to swap soft-spoken, tough-guy lies after lights-out. Returning from Winslow after packing my mother"s books, I collapsed, Hotel du Lac in hand, into a chair in the living room, too exhausted to do anything but stare at the wall of my own books, as well as the impressive pyramid of those that remained boxed and stacked right up to the ceiling in the corner. I counted these, trying to gauge how many additional bookcases would be required, where on the coast of Maine we"d find them, when there"d be time to look, and where we"d put them, but it had been a long day and I was far too tired to solve a problem with so many moving parts. I even was too worn out to roust myself from the chair and locate the shelf that contained the other Anita Brookners. Possibly they were still in one of those side boxes. Sitting there utterly drained, I wondered if maybe I was slipping into a funk of my own. Over the years I"d noticed that I was susceptible to my mother"s moods, especially after spending a fair amount of time in her company. It was something I had to be careful of, because her periods of irrationality and dark depression had a tendency to infect both my writing and family life. I"d expected to feel better as soon as I got home, but instead, for some reason, I felt worse. Staring at all those books, shelved or not, I suddenly felt something akin to the anxiety-dread, really-that I knew my mother was prey to when her routines were in disarray.
One of her most cherished (and to my mind absurd) convictions had always been that she and I were essentially the same. If we didn"t always see eye to eye, that was because I was twenty-five years younger; given time, I"d surely come around. Furthermore, at the heart of our most serious disagreements, she believed, was our fundamental similarity-our magnetic poles in effect repelling each other. I"d long imagined that she developed this ridiculous theory in order to explain to herself how she could have brought into the world a kid who couldn"t have been more different from her if he"d been a foundling. But what if she was right? Was I really so different? In this respect her relationship to her own mother-a woman she considered conventional and moralistic and repressed-was ill.u.s.trative. On the one hand there was no denying the two women agreed about virtually nothing, but there were some truly eerie temperamental similarities. One of my most vivid early memories of my grandmother had to do with her ongoing battles with milk. She preferred milk in bottles, but when home delivery ceased she had no choice but to switch to supermarket cartons, which she invariably tried to squeeze open at the wrong side, then attacked with a dull paring knife. Like my mother, once she embarked upon a particular course of action, however misguided, she was incapable of reversing it, and the consequences could be explosive, even b.l.o.o.d.y. Many times I"d found her in the kitchen, emitting a high, throaty moan, with a pool of milk dyed pink at her feet. When I asked what happened, she"d show me her punctured thumb or wrist and say, in the voice of a little girl, "I hurt me," as if the wound itself was the explanation I"d asked for.
In no time her ferocious, irrational attacks on these cartons became legend, the stuff of sidesplitting comedy when reenacted at family gatherings, but as a boy, though I couldn"t have articulated why, they troubled me. That someone would remain so faithful to a misbegotten strategy made no sense to me, and like most children I wanted things to make sense, for the world to be a rational place. "Gram," I"d say, picking up the mutilated carton from the floor, "look." And then I"d squeeze at the correct end, which opened obligingly. I imagined I was showing her that the hurt and blood and mess were all unnecessary, but of course I had it exactly wrong. It was the mutilation of the carton and the wounding that were necessary. These satisfied some need I couldn"t begin to fathom but that was, in any case, real.
Moreover, while I couldn"t have explained this either, my grandmother"s syntax, as well as the little-girl cadence she used only when she"d injured herself, creeped me out. She never said I hurt myself but rather I hurt me, as if me and I were different people entirely, and the one holding the paring knife had stabbed an innocent bystander. Showing me her angry gashes and puncture wounds, she always seemed to want sympathy and understanding, but these, though I loved her, I was never able to summon. It seemed to me that such irrational behavior needed to change, that warring with the milk cartons was simple lunacy. Perhaps in some remote sector of my kid"s brain I"d also linked my otherwise sane grandmother"s short-lived but recurring bouts of madness to whatever it was that possessed my mother from time to time. I"d be much older before I began to see the good talkings-to my mother was always giving herself as somehow related to my grandmother"s "I hurt me"-both implying a divided or fractured self-but I might have sensed the correlation even then. Nor would the necessary inference have completely escaped me. If my mother was like my grandmother with her cartons, then she"d never truly learn. Like her own mother, she"d just keep hacking away and hurting herself in the process. Which, forty years later, seemed a pretty fair description of how things stood.
Still, did the fact that my mother was more like her mother than she cared to admit mean that I was more like mine than I cared to? Did the fact that I occasionally had more sympathy for and insight into my mother"s behavior than, say, my wife, who was justifiably weary of it, suggest that I was like my mother, as she always so confidently claimed, or simply that I"d been observing her longer? The latter, surely. For compelling evidence I needed to look no farther than the book in my hand. I opened Hotel du Lac and read the first page:
From the window all that could be seen was a receding area of grey. It was to be supposed that beyond the grey garden, which seemed to sprout nothing but the stiffish leaves of some unfamiliar plant, lay the vast grey lake, spreading like an anaesthetic towards the invisible further sh.o.r.e, and beyond that, in imagination only, yet verified by the brochure, the peak of the Dent d"Oche, on which snow might already be slightly and silently falling. For it was late September, out of season; the tourists had gone, the rates were reduced, and there were few inducements for visitors in this small town at the water"s edge, whose inhabitants, uncommunicative to begin with, were frequently rendered taciturn by the dense cloud that descended for days at a time.
What in the world had possessed me to think my mother would enjoy a book that began like this? "Grey" was used three times in the first two sentences to describe the physical landscape, and my mother"s interior landscape was gray already. Her purpose in reading was to flee that grayness into a brighter, more colorful world. She loved for books to take her to exciting new places, and she might well have enjoyed a novel set in a sw.a.n.k Swiss hotel on a lake, but she never would"ve wanted to go there out of season at reduced rates after all the interesting people had left. I"d taught the novel at Colby the year before, so its narrative details were still fresh in my mind. The protagonist was a middle-aged writer named Edith Hope, who, unlike Anita Brookner, wrote the kind of romance novels my mother might actually have liked to read. At the hotel Edith meets a man named Neville, who makes her an insulting proposal of marriage, not a love match but a union of convenience that will allow each of them societal "cover" as well as romantic freedom. Lest she reject the unflattering offer out of hand, Neville rather cruelly adds that given Edith"s age and rather plain appearance (in her cardigan sweaters she resembles Virginia Woolf), she"s unlikely to get a better one.
My Colby students, an otherwise pretty savvy bunch, had immediately identified Neville as the novel"s villain, ignoring the more subtle, lifelong cruelty Edith had suffered at the hands of her mother and female friends, the very ones who"d packed her off to Switzerland after she fell in love and made a fool of herself back in London. My female students-all in their early twenties-were particularly unwilling to acknowledge the grim possibility that Neville"s offer might in fact be the best Edith would ever get, and they were of one voice in proclaiming that she should reject his cynical proposal and wait for love. If their male cla.s.smates thought differently, they held their tongues, suggesting just how thorough the cultural training of the late Eighties had been for both genders.
That, I now recalled, was why I"d given the book to my mother in the first place, because she"d gotten her cultural training in an upstate New York mill town four decades earlier, and I was curious to see if she"d twig to what my female students had ignored. The results of this experiment had been both gratifying and dispiriting. My mother hadn"t really enjoyed the book and certainly didn"t want to read any more Brookner, but just as I suspected the novel"s theme of women"s cruelty to women had resonated deeply, and her identification with poor Edith Hope, while not wholehearted, had been sufficient to initiate one of her diatribes against her own mother and sister, who had done their level best, she reminded me, to undermine her at every turn and might ultimately have succeeded in destroying her self-confidence if she hadn"t escaped Gloversville when she did. The choice Edith had to make didn"t particularly interest her. The solution-as my mother saw it-was to return next year, in season, with a better wardrobe, so she"d likely meet a better cla.s.s of man. She saw Neville as less of a villain than a nonent.i.ty.
All of which was, though I hadn"t foreseen it, an entirely predictable response. In truth my mother had always been suspicious of women. If there were two lines at the bank or the post office, she"d invariably queue up in the man"s, even if the woman"s was shorter. The more important the circ.u.mstance-to purchase a money order, say, or pay a bill-the more determined she was to wait. If a new window opened and she was asked by a female clerk if she could be of service, my mother would smile and say, "Thank you, but I"ll just wait for the man," as if this were perfectly reasonable, as if hers was the well-established and undeniable preference of both genders. Of course in those days the man was more likely to be senior, but it wasn"t that so much as the fact that my mother always did better dealing with men. She was attractive, and men often fell all over themselves trying to help her out. If she made a mistake in filling out a form, they"d produce a new one and correct the error themselves, where a woman might"ve sent her away with fine-print instructions.
But it went deeper than that. The whole time I was growing up, I never knew my mother to have a female friend. There was one woman, a coworker at GE, whom she was close to for a time, until they had a falling-out over what my mother claimed was a betrayal-the other woman getting a promotion my mother had a.s.sumed would be hers. This was a pattern that would repeat itself again and again over the next several decades. She"d meet a woman her age, usually at a new job, and they"d discover they had interests in common; a tentative friendship would develop, one that seemed destined to evolve into emotional intimacy, but then something bad would happen. Whether it was friction on the job, or that they"d become interested in the same man, things always ended with my mother feeling backstabbed. She must"ve been as frequently disappointed by men as she was by women, but she treated these as individual, indeed isolated, cases. Often, when she looked back on a failed romantic relationship, she blamed herself, admitting that all the signs had been there and she"d just been too blind, too taken in, to see through his charm, whereas when a woman disappointed her, all women were to blame, and her resolution not to waste her time on female friendships grew much stronger. That was why I was reluctant for her to so easily surrender her friendship with Dot, her Winslow friend. Their camaraderie had lasted quite a while, and I"d begun to wonder if the relationship"s longevity might represent a breakthrough.
But perhaps not. As her reaction to Hotel du Lac had demonstrated, her distrust of women was deep-seated. While she must have realized that Brookner, at least thematically, was a potential soul mate, that didn"t matter. Though she"d understood the novel far better than anyone in my cla.s.s, she"d disliked it every bit as much, if for the exact opposite reason. Because it had challenged a received feminist truth about female solidarity, my students had concluded that Brookner was lying to them about the world. Whereas my mother disliked the book precisely because she was being told the truth. That wasn"t what she read fiction for.
Indeed, the books I"d spent the afternoon packing-so varied in genre, including historical romances, detective novels, romantic thrillers, travel books-had in common a rea.s.suring conventionality that couldn"t entirely be accounted for by the decades, the Thirties through the early Sixties, during which most of them had been written. My mother"s large collection of murder mysteries was particularly instructive. She much preferred the English variety, with its emphasis on the restoration of order. In books by her favorite "Golden Age" British mystery writers-Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, John d.i.c.kson Carr, and Agatha Christie-evil might lurk around every foggy corner, and murder most foul would throw everything into temporary flux, but in the end the detective, often a rogue aristocrat like Lord Peter Wimsey or Roderick Alleyn, ferreted out the culprit in a stunning display of logic, intuition and, often, an understanding of complex social realities for which aristocrats, in novels like these if nowhere else, are famous.
American murder mysteries left her cold. She thought they were less clever, which was true enough; Raymond Chandler famously couldn"t follow his own plots. But they also operated on an entirely different set of premises. Here detectives didn"t solve crimes by means of brilliant deductions or arcane knowledge. In American detective novels the hero"s primary virtues are his honesty and his ability to take a punch. Sam Spade hasn"t much interest in restoring order because, as he knows all too well, that order was corrupt to begin with. Villains are typically either rich men who made their money dishonestly or, worse yet, people of limited moral imagination who aspire only to what money and power can buy, who want to move up in cla.s.s and don"t care how. In this noir world, cops are on the take, lawyers and judges all have a price, as do doctors and newspapermen. In a sea of corruption your only hope is a lone man, someone you can hire but who can"t be bought off by anybody who has more money. There probably is no figure in literature more romantic than Philip Marlowe, whose very name suggests knight-errantry, and my mother was herself a romantic of the first order, but she had no more use for Marlowe than she had for Anita Brookner. Men like Marlowe always ended up telling her what she didn"t want to hear. Okay, he might find your missing child or husband, but often you"d end up wishing he hadn"t, because he"d also find out something you didn"t want to know about that child or husband or even yourself, something you"d been trying hard not to look at, or admit to. What kind of escape was that? Better to get good news from a fop like Lord Peter, whose sell-by date in the real world would have long since expired, had anyone like him ever existed in the first place.
The historical novels my mother favored were similarly revealing. They featured a brave, stalwart heroine who invariably would prove herself worthy of the dashing fellow she"d fallen in love with, often by testing her mettle in his world. If she fell in love with a pirate, she might for a time become a pirate herself. Their freedom from social mores, however, was understood to be a phase, like adolescence, and their adventures always culminated in marriage, an inst.i.tution that would tame the heroine"s wilder impulses and make the hero a responsible citizen. To facilitate these matters, the former rogue would be discovered to be actually an aristocrat who"d been cheated out of his estate, which in the final chapter is restored to him. It was a complicated fantasy, one that allowed my mother to think of herself as a rebel while actually being, in her heart of hearts, a conformist. Though she claimed not to be a prude, she preferred s.e.x not to be explicit but rather relegated to the s.p.a.ce breaks or implied by the coy nicknames ("my sugar wench") given the heroine by her paramour. Reality, especially of the grim sort, should at all costs be kept at bay, regardless of the genre. She claimed to love anything about Ireland or England or Spain, but in fact she needed books in these settings to be warm and comfy, more like Maeve Binchy than William Trevor. Not surprisingly, given that she"d felt trapped most of her life, she loved books about time travel, but only if the places the characters traveled to were ones she was interested in. She had exactly no interest in the future or in any past that didn"t involve romantic adventure.
Still, illuminating though literary taste can be, the more I thought about it, neither my mother"s library nor my own meant quite what I wanted it to. If my books were more serious and literary than hers, that was due more to nurture than nature. If I didn"t read much escapist fiction, it was because I lived a blessed life from which I neither needed nor desired to escape. I wasn"t a superior person, just an educated one, and for that in large measure I had my mother to thank. Maybe she"d tried to talk me out of becoming a writer, but she was more responsible than anyone for my being one. Back when we lived on Helwig Street, at the end of her long workdays at GE, after making her scant supper and cleaning up, after doing the laundry (without benefit of a washing machine) and ironing, after making sure I was set for school the next day, she might"ve collapsed in front of the television, but she didn"t. She read. Every night. Her taste, unformed as mine would later be by a score of literature professors, was equally dogmatic; she read her Daphne du Mauriers and Mary Stewarts until their covers fell off and had to be replaced. It was from my mother that I learned reading was not a duty but a reward, and from her that I intuited a vital truth: most people are trapped in a solitary existence, a life circ.u.mscribed by want and failures of imagination, limitations from which readers are exempt. You can"t make a writer without first making a reader, and that"s what my mother made me. Moreover, though I"d outgrown her books, they had a hand in shaping the kind of writer I"d eventually become-one who, unlike many university-trained writers, didn"t consider plot a dirty word, who paid attention to audience and pacing, who had little tolerance for literary pretension.
No, in order to make the case that my mother and I weren"t two peas in a genetic pod, I needed to identify something in my basic nature, some habit of mind or innate ability that I"d always possessed, traceable all the way back to who I"d been on Helwig Street, not who I"d become in the meantime. Was it possible I was literally staring at it? Could it be that our bookshelves-not the books themselves or what was in them but rather their current haphazard arrangement-provided the answer to why my mother and I were forever at loggerheads? Two weeks earlier, Barbara and I had hastily thrown onto the shelves as many books as would fit, then moved on to more pressing tasks. Indeed, since moving to Camden, we"d been in what I thought of as "this now, that later" mode. With dozens of tasks to complete each day (with everything, to borrow my mother"s word, unsettled), they all were constantly being prioritized and reprioritized. This now, that later mode was all about making sound decisions on the fly about what had to be attended to now and what could wait. Logic and reason were important, but often you had to go on intuition and feel. What you saw in your peripheral vision could be as important as what you were looking at directly. On the basis of incomplete data, you had to make educated guesses and try to see three or four moves in advance, to antic.i.p.ate the Law of Unintended Consequences before it kicked in. Just as vital, you had to accept that you were going to make mistakes from time to time. When you messed up, it was important not to mind and even more important to promptly reverse course. You also had to understand that at any given moment there were decisions you simply couldn"t make yet and have faith that given time some problems would resolve themselves. What we were engaged in was a kind of domestic triage, and I"d always been pretty good at that, G.o.d only knew why, because this was something completely left out of my mother. I hadn"t forgotten how, back in Phoenix, I"d had to reorder her daily to-do lists so they made at least a little sense and we didn"t waste time retracing our steps. At eighteen I was already cringing at her due-south instincts and her inability, once she"d begun a task, to abandon it for a more important one. She couldn"t possibly have lived with the chaos of our bookshelves for two days, much less two weeks. Even as a young man I could see how much her faulty decision making was costing her, that because of her inflexible adherence to poor sequencing she was forever discovering, too late, that her ship, which could easily have been turned around while out at sea, now had to be rotated in the cramped harbor.
It now occurred to me that I"d been trying to resequence my mother"s to-do lists ever since, with decidedly mixed results. Sometimes she"d grasp my organizing principle and say, "Oh, aren"t you clever!" But more often she"d insist on doing things her own way and become monumentally annoyed when I pointed out that B really had to follow A, that getting A right was the key to both B and C, that A was the necessary foundation upon which the remaining alphabet would rest. To this she"d respond that different people saw things differently, and that to her, B was more important than A. Worse, she was always so proud of her tortured logic. She loved to explicate, detail by wobbly detail, how she"d arrived at her dubious conclusions. She wasn"t unlike the detectives in her locked-room mysteries, who would reveal in the final excruciating chapter how the villainous deed was done, that the murderer was legless, which was why, once he"d removed his prostheses, no one had observed him running away on his stumps on the far side of the shoulder-high hedge. Leaving the reader to say, "I"m sorry, what?"
When I was eighteen and my mother in her forties, our disagreements over process were seldom serious. She liked to say there was more than one way to skin a cat and that when I got to be her age I"d have odd habits, too. But over the years, as I became increasingly responsible for the outcomes of her insistence on doing things out of their natural and practical order, together with my growing impatience with her interminable, brain-scalding explanations, there were more serious disputes. At times, rather than argue, I"d just throw up my hands. "Do what you want," I"d tell her, halfway out the door. "Let me know how it turns out." And sometimes, the phone would ring an hour later, and she"d say, "Now I see what you meant." But just as often her voice would be triumphant, once she"d somehow succeeded in forcing the square peg into the round hole with a mallet and now was eager to explain the brilliance of her violent solution. This, then, was surely what I was looking for: the hardwired difference, probably genetic in origin, between my mother and me, the root of our ongoing conflict and the reason that I was seldom able, as she put it, "to take her side."
Except this didn"t really wash either. For one thing, while it might be true that I was good at domestic triage and she sucked at it, a more significant truth was that my mother and grandmother weren"t the only ones who wouldn"t stop flying in the face of reason. It would"ve been nice to see myself as Sisyphus and my current exhaustion as existential, the result of three-plus decades of attempting to correctly sequence my mother"s metaphorical to-do lists without her permission or a.s.sistance. But in fact I was worn out from dealing with the consequences of what I myself had set in motion back in the spring when I stubbornly ignored Barbara"s or. Because surely some part of me had known it was folly to plant that FOR SALE sign in front of our Waterville home and even worse folly to imagine I could put my mother and her needs on the back burner for however long it took for us to get settled.
More specifically, the time had come to admit that none of my plan was working out. Since moving to Camden, we"d become a literally divided family. The girls" bedrooms were on the second floor of the main house; Barb and I occupied the apartment over the garage, so we were often not aware of their comings and goings. We"d planned on using money from the sale of the Waterville property to convert the upstairs apartment into our master bedroom suite, but it hadn"t even been shown in more than a month, which meant we might be exiled from our house-in-progress for the foreseeable future while carrying two mortgages. In another six weeks Emily"s college tuition would come due, as would Kate"s to her new prep school. The upscale a.s.sisted-living apartment we"d eventually found for my mother would cost almost as much as a third tuition. We were keeping the rent a secret from her, but she was bound to find out soon. Barbara, having quit her job at Colby, was looking for work on the coast and not finding any, and my West Coast film agent was looking for screen projects for me and not finding any, and at long last it was becoming clear that the back-end money I"d been hoping for from the n.o.body"s Fool movie wasn"t going to materialize for the simple reason that there wasn"t any, at least not for writers, and only a fool would have believed otherwise. As if all this weren"t enough, I was still a good year from delivering (and getting paid for) my next novel. The problem wasn"t sequencing but rather my unwillingness to admit I"d been wrong. After realizing how the Camden house could be made to work for us and then imagining us in it, I"d become not only determined to see it through but also blind to reason. While there"d been numerous opportunities to turn this ship around, I"d stubbornly held to our dubious course, expertly navigating us into Camden"s tiny, expensive harbor, where we were now trapped.
All of which was beginning to feel like a cosmic I-told-you-so. My mother"s deep conviction had always been that she and I were cut from the same cloth. From the time I was a boy, whenever we disagreed, she"d tell me that later on, when I was her age, I"d think as she did, an a.s.sertion that never failed to infuriate me, suggesting as it did that I wasn"t her offspring but her clone, and over the years nothing gave me more pleasure than to reflect on how wrong she was, that I most a.s.suredly didn"t think like she did, and that time had only widened this gap, not narrowed it. What I hadn"t realized was that in addition to being dead wrong, she was also profoundly right, or would have been if her claim had been articulated just a little differently. She said I"d one day think as she did; what she probably meant was that one day I"d be like her-obsessive, dogged, and rigid.
How could I have failed to see in myself the very traits I"d so confidently a.s.signed to her? The evidence was everywhere. Take, for instance, my freshman year at the university, when I"d become addicted to, of all things, pinball. For several months a particular machine in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the student center took total possession of my mind. It had begun innocently enough. One evening, after dinner at the cafeteria, I"d visited the game room with some friends and wasted a couple of quarters, which back then got you three plays. The next night, though, I"d returned without my friends, and the night after that. Very quickly I began thinking of this machine as mine and during dinner would become panicky at the thought of somebody getting on it before I could. Once I"d claimed the machine, if I had a run of bad luck that necessitated my leaving it to get more quarters, and some other sallow, pathetic nerd was at its controls when I returned, I"d have to swallow a black, homicidal fury. In a matter of days there was simply no life outside the game room. I went to cla.s.s, of course, but even there, as my professors spoke, I could hear my machine"s distinctive clangs and clanks on the other side of campus, its score hurtling upward, registering bonus points from the b.u.mpers and targets that were hardest to hit, then the lovely, sweet thunk of free games popping up in its tiny window, a sound that caused the other wretched denizens of the game room to suspend their own activities and crowd around. Soon, to ensure I"d have enough quarters to play for a couple of hours, I started selling my evening meal ticket, telling myself I wasn"t hungry anyway, and playing late into the evening when I should have been studying, stopping only when my luck and skill ran out. Worse, since I always told my roommates I was going to the library, they regarded my late nights and my pale, drained appearance when I finally returned to the dorm as evidence of a virtuous dedication they themselves lacked. There were girls from my cla.s.ses I wanted to ask out, but whatever money I set aside for the weekend would be gone by midweek. I lost weight, becoming as wraithlike as Gollum with his "Precious." For months that inexplicable and humiliating madness held me in its grip until one evening, on my very first quarter, I entered some kind of zone, winning so many free games that the thought of actually playing them made me ill. Suddenly both sated and sane, I simply walked away and never went back.
A couple years later, though, in graduate school, I was seized by my father"s particular mania and found myself on a shuttle between the grungy dog track in South Tucson and any nickel-and-dime poker table I could find. The track was particularly depressing, a magnet for the city"s poorest and most desperate souls. Friday nights were the worst because you could tell at a glance that some of the men had come directly from work, that instead of going home, they"d cashed their paychecks at the track and were betting the week"s grocery money. I recognized them-the way they studied the racing form so furtively, their darting eyes mining the abstruse data for tips; they were Gloversville men, somehow magically transported to the desert, and here I was among them again. Being a literature student, I was of course susceptible to metaphor, and when the mechanical rabbit made the turn in front of the starting gate and the foolish greyhounds bolted after it, I remember wondering if I was the only one in the park who understood its terrible significance, and if that made me any smarter or dumber than these guys with low-wage, dead-end jobs. Poker? Well, betting nickels, dimes, and quarters you couldn"t get hurt too bad. That"s what I told myself, but you be the judge.
Even more horrifying than such ugly, stupid obsessions was the fact that I couldn"t even take credit for triumphing over them. The day I sold blood to buy my way into a poker game, I hadn"t looked at myself in the mirror and said, Enough. Nor, to borrow my mother"s phrase, had I given myself a good talking-to. That would have been pointless. I knew myself well enough to know I wasn"t listening. No, I"d simply bided my time and waited for the current madness to run its course, after which it would likely be replaced by some new, as-yet-unimagined idiocy, no doubt every bit as humiliating and self-destructive as the last. Or perhaps worse. This was what really terrified me. If I could be seduced by a pinball machine, by the tacky allure of a dog track, what would I do if I was offered a real temptation? What if my next obsession took the form of a woman? Would I give myself a good talking-to then, reminding myself that I loved my wife, that I"d been preparing for a life of the mind, that I wanted to be a good man? Or would I become a character out of a Jim Thompson novel, pathetic and helpless in the grip of something strong and merciless and utterly relentless? It was possible.
The Camden house was empty and still. My daughters had taken summer jobs at a popular waterfront restaurant, and Barbara was off somewhere. I"d been looking forward to seeing them when I got home, a distraction from the guilt and fear and dread that had gnawed at me as I"d driven home from Winslow, to our chaotic, jumbled library, with its boxes waiting to be unpacked. But for some reason I now felt like unfit company and was grateful to be alone. Unless I was mistaken, something inside my mother had finally broken, and it was my fault. I thought about calling her and apologizing for everything, especially for asking her to do something I knew she was incapable of: to be patient for an unspecified period of time, to live with every last thing up in the air. But then I remembered that she was going out to dinner with Dot.
Across the room, on a high shelf, were copies of books I"d written and literary periodicals where I"d published stories and essays and reviews. Rising at last, I walked over and ran my fingers along their spines, smiling not so much with pleasure at the achievement as with the realization of its source. The biggest difference between my mother and me, I now saw clearly, had less to do with either nature or nurture than with blind dumb luck, the third and often lethal rail of human destiny. My next obsession might well have been a woman, or a narcotic, or a bottle of tequila. Instead I"d stumbled on storytelling and become infected. Halfway through my doctoral dissertation, I"d nearly quit so I could write full-time. Not because I imagined I was particularly gifted or that one day I"d be able to earn a living. I simply had to. It was the game room and the dog track all over again. An unreasoning fit of must. That, no doubt, was what my mother had recognized and abhorred, what had caused her to remind me about my responsibilities as a husband and father.
It didn"t take long for me to learn that novel writing was a line of work that suited my temperament and played to my strengths, such as they were. Because-and don"t let anybody tell you different-novel writing is mostly triage (this now, that later) and obstinacy. Feeling your way around in the dark, trying to antic.i.p.ate the Law of Unintended Consequences. Living with and welcoming uncertainty. Trying something, and when that doesn"t work, trying something else. Welcoming clutter. Surrendering a good idea for a better one. Knowing you won"t find the finish line for a year or two, or five, or maybe never, without caring much. Putting one foot in front of the other. Taking small bites, chewing thoroughly. Grinding it out. Knowing that when you"ve finally settled everything that can be, you"ll immediately seek out more chaos. Rinse and repeat. Somehow, without ever intending to, I"d discovered how to turn obsession and what my grandmother used to call sheer cussedness-character traits that had dogged both my parents, causing them no end of difficulty-to my advantage. The same qualities that over a lifetime had contracted my mother"s world had somehow expanded mine. How and by what mechanism? Dumb luck? Grace? I honestly have no idea. Call it whatever you want-except virtue.
Real Time
WHEN SHE OPENED the door, I took an involuntary step back at the sight. Her hair wild, her eyes wide and frantic, she was still in her nightgown, the madwoman in the attic, straight out of Jane Eyre. She grabbed my arm, pulling me inside. "What time is it?"
Eight forty-five, I told her. I"d arrived, as I always did, at the appointed moment. Being late, even by a minute or two, was always a mistake. When I knocked, she"d often open the door before my hand could fall to my side; in winter she"d already have her coat on, her purse over her arm. "I saw you from the kitchen window when you pulled in," she"d say, as if waiting at the window was less nutty than waiting at the door. So what on earth was this? Had she overslept? Given how lethargic she"d been lately, it was possible.
But she wasn"t lethargic now. Indeed, when I told her the time, she flew across the room with alarming haste, especially given her claim that her legs always locked up whenever she had to hurry. On the pad of paper she kept next to her telephone, she scrawled 8:45 and, underneath that, REAL TIME. Then she stared at the pad, as if expecting the words or numbers to change before her eyes.
"Mom," I said. "Why did you write down the time?"
"So I"ll know," she said, still studying what she"d just scribbled.